recent user reviews

Blood Drive

You’ll Deserve A Cookie After Putting Up With This Blood Drive

America can’t get past its zombie obsession. We have more zombie
movies, TV shows, and video games than ever before – we zombified
versions of action figures, superhero comics, and Jane Austin novels.
And now we have Blood Drive, a zombified Twisted Metal rip-off. While
running over hordes of undead in cars built to shred steel and bone
isn’t a terrible premise, this killer car combat title is as fun to
drive as a classic car that’s been trashed by years of neglect.

After
the zombie apocalypse, the Vegas-like town of Las Ruletas plays home to
a car combat reality show starring a group of mentally disturbed
caricatures so out-of-this-world that they’d be out of place on a WWE
pay-per-view event. These Blood Drive tournaments are vehicular
gladiatorial matches where contestants battle each other across obstacle
courses littered with the undead. The tone is playful, and the subject
matter is ripe for comic mischief, but the story is superficial at best
and we’re given little context for each event. Since there really is no
story, and the single-player game only consists of timed challenges and
tournaments with AI racers, the offline experience is nearly the same as
what you’ll find online (good luck finding online opponents, by the
way).

Blood Drive has a mixture of challenges: explosive
destruction derbies, checkpoint races, and score competitions that
require you to run over the most zombies. However, they begin to feel
repetitive after a few hours. The game’s mix of weapons is unbalanced,
but the bigger problem is how these Frankenstein vehicles control. Most
of the cars take corners about as well as a shambling corpse, and the
smaller, more agile vehicles have trouble standing up to the more
tank-like trucks. You need to be able to absorb a lot of damage, because
you won’t be dishing out too much of it. Aiming – or even driving in a
straight line – is often a challenge. If you hit so much as a pebble,
your car ends up jerking off-course. Bigger collisions can send you
floating into the air for several seconds, making you an easy target for
the hawkeyed AI.

Anyone looking for a quick car combat fix before
next year’s Twisted Metal might be able to waste a few hours on this
title, but they won’t be wholly enjoyable hours. Since you can’t save in
the middle of a tournament, and some the later cups last a couple
hours, the game eventually tests your endurance. I’d rather give bone
marrow than sit through this Blood Drive again.